


The Waking Wood

by grimark



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Oral Sex, Other, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5967318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grimark/pseuds/grimark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the second night, she comes to him.<br/>(Old fill for a km prompt asking for 'creepy dubcon from the three day period between Arabella being replaced by a moss oak and aforementioned moss oak dying')</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Arabella

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first fanfic I ever wrote, for the js&mn kinkmeme. I decided to post it here for posterity.  
> Originally written 12/08/15

On the second night, she comes to him.

Shivering, delirious, exiled to her sickbed, aching with both fever and separation from her husband- she can’t think straight, can’t quite remember, but surely they usually sleep with each other? He is her husband and she is his wife, she knows this in the core of her being, and they are not meant to be apart-

He flinches wildly when she climbs in next to him.

“Sorry, Bell,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head. “I was dreaming.”

She wants to be near him. He shouldn’t be dreaming of anything except her.

“Good lord, you’re freezing,” he remarks, pulling her in close. She knows she’s freezing, they found her wandering out in the snow, her feet are bare and she’s cold to the bone, but being next to him makes it better. She reaches up to stroke his face. Her husband’s face. He smiles and turns to kiss the palm of her hand.

“I feel as though I have not been terribly attentive to your needs of late,” he says.

“Nonsense,” she protests, needing to reassure him in this more than anything. He is perfect, he is loving and devoted. Didn’t he say that he loved her above all else, after all? That she was his wife, and none other?

He kisses her wrist next, and then her mouth. She is still and does not resist. He kisses her neck.  
“Are you certain you do not feel unwell?” He asks, holding her face between his hands.

She offers him a smile. “Just a little cold,” she says. “Can you make me warm?”

His expression is devilish as he reaches beneath the hem of her nightgown, and smooths a hand up her leg. She leans her face against his shoulder. He is soft and smells salty, animal. It’s not something she’s used to, but she’s growing to like it.

He touches her in the secret hollow at the crux of her legs (roots?) and she arches instinctively towards his hand. His fingers stroke gently into her.

Now he is pulling away from her side, down to the other end of the bed, and she would cry out at the loss of his presence, but his sweet smile tells her to trust him.  
He puts his tongue where his fingers were, his soft animal tongue, and she begins to feel a dampness, like morning dew on leaves. He’s spreading her open and she’s feeling things she’s never felt before. She shifts anxiously upon the bed, unsure whether she wants to move away from the feeling or towards it, to engulf it inside her and never let it go.

There is a strange sort of pressure building up inside her body. She reaches down to tangle her twigs in his hair, where they belong. Oh, to think of all the years she’d spent buried in peat, never suspecting the outside world might hold such experiences as these! Oh, the love of her husband, and the devotion he showed her with his mouth and his hands!

He sits up now, kneeling between her legs. He enters her, as it is customary for animals to do, and ruts into her. But this too brings her an unexpected pleasure, especially when he leans down to kiss her on the mouth again.

“Do you love me?” she asks, gazing up at him. “You must tell me how much you love me.”

“You already know,” he replies.

She frowns. “You must say it.”

He reaches out to caress her face. His hands are so strange and soft.  
“I love you more than anything,” he says. “I love you more than magic- more than life itself.”

The pressure inside her becomes nearly unbearable, and she is wracked with shakes like branches in the wind.

Slowly, slowly, the sluggish sap within her veins begins to move, and for a time she is warm again.


	2. Jonathan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JONATHAN STRANGE/A TREE REPRISE

Ever since the Peninsula, Jonathan’s dreams have changed. He dreams of war, and of corpses with dead eyes and toothless mouths, reaching out to stroke his face and run cold fingers through his hair.

Before, he used to have nightmares about Bell sometimes, about her suffering or dying. Often the dreams weren’t specific, just that something terrible had happened to her and it was his fault, likely as not.  
Jonathan worries that this means he is selfish, if he doesn’t dream about her anymore.

When Arabella goes missing, Jonathan can’t help but blame himself. He’s finally done it, he thinks. Finally become so absorbed in himself and his cause that she’s decided to leave him, and he didn’t even notice. When she is returned to him, pale and clammy and shivering, the first thing she does is cling to him, begging for reassurance, babbling nonsense-

“Do you accept me- your wife?” she asks.  
She’s wearing a black gown. Mourning dress. She never wears black, claims it makes her appear pallid. At the time, this strikes him as odd.  
“You are a poor husband,” she says, reaching up to touch his face.

Mr. Newton, the physician, is called the next day. Arabella is tossing and turning on a sopha, in the grasp of some fever dream. She has been walking in the woods, she says, and the trees were reaching out to her. She needed to see her brothers and sisters, buried though they were beneath the earth.

“Listen to me, Bell,” he begs her, smoothing a rope of tangled hair from her sweat-spotted brow. “Your brother is upstairs. He is certainly not underground.”

She shakes her head, a restless jerk. “I do not know whom you mean. My brothers are in the woods.”

The physician is unable to discover anything the matter with her, but agrees to come back in a few days’ time.  
“Her wits are plainly disordered,” Jonathan argues. “And this gown she was wearing, I have never seen it before in my life.”

“Well,” says Mr. Newton good-naturedly, “many husbands are unaware of the contents of their wives’ wardrobes. I don’t believe it is a thing to be concerned by.”

“But Arabella never wears black,” is all Jonathan can say in response.

That night, Jonathan dreams in red. Hot sun, and dust, and blood, blood, blood. He can hear the cries of dying men- or are they those of men already dead? He is no longer sure.  
He believes he is beginning to understand the languages of Hell.

Jonathan dreams of himself lying down to sleep, when one of the dead Neapolitans attempts to lie down next to him.  
He jerks away, revolted by its cold, dead touch, and this is enough to propel him back into the land of the living.  
His heartbeat calms as he discovers it is not one of those horrible, shambling things after all- it is his wife. She has peeled back the covers and slipped into bed with him.

Her fever seems to have broken, as she is no longer hot to the touch, but instead as chilled as if she had just come in from the snow.

“Good lord, Bell, you’re freezing,” he says, and pulls her in close to him. He hopes she has not been wandering around again. She has been unwell, and she should rest.

The feeling of guilt assails him again. He wants to make it up to her.

Jonathan rains kisses down on her, as sweetly as he knows how, and she is strangely unresponsive to his advances. Does this mean she’s upset with him? Or does her illness linger yet?

Arabella reassures him that she is simply cold, which is clear for anyone to see.  
“Can you warm me up?” she asks, and this, this he can do for her.

Jonathan’s hands shake sometimes, even when he is holding her. He is determined that they will not do so now.  
She has always liked when he uses his mouth on her, and after a while it’s enough to have her twisting and gasping above him.  
He has not done this for quite some time and it feels different somehow, exploring and rediscovering all at once. He tastes something wild upon his lips, something slumbering and dormant that has now begun to grow.

Later, as they sleep, cradled safely in each other’s arms, Jonathan dreams again. He is walking in the woods, and the trees are reaching out to him. Dark roots burst through dark earth, twisting up to grasp at him and hold him tight.


End file.
